...is the name of the band whose show you missed tonight. The Platonic Form of Rock, formerly known as The Matt Show, debuted tonight at the Empyrean coffehouse in Spokane to an audience of my wife, the proprieters, and several homeless people looking in through the window. So far The Platonic Form of Rock features me on guitar and singing, and Seth playing percussion. The Empyrean's performance space is a literal hole in the wall. They rented the out of buisness storefront next to theirs and stripped it, then knocked a hole in the wall to connect the two. It's really quite cool. Unfortunately, it's a little outside of central downtown Spokane and on a sort of bad stretch of street. We were advised to park our car where we could see it all night. Aside from that, this place is really cool, and hopefully it will take off.
So how did The Platonic Form of Rock come to be? This morning I was woken up by the arts calendar on the radio announcing an open mic night at Rock Coffee downtown. Determined not to let this opportunity slip by, and to really get my money's worth out of the last day of summer before school starts, I stopped by Seth's and told him we had a gig. Of course, at that point we didn't have a band yet, so we got together just before the show and put together a few old songs of mine. When we got to Rock Coffee, they informed us that the open mic night had to be cancelled this week, but told us of another local coffehouse that was holding one. That's how we ended up at the Empyrean.
Long story short, we rocked. We rocked uber-hard to an audience that at times was composed entirely of Jeni. Hopefully we'll get to do that again someime. I'll let you know when the next show is.
Tonight's Set List:
Too Good
Without A Scream
O Ephraim
Alesis MultiMix 8 USB
So how did The Platonic Form of Rock come to be? This morning I was woken up by the arts calendar on the radio announcing an open mic night at Rock Coffee downtown. Determined not to let this opportunity slip by, and to really get my money's worth out of the last day of summer before school starts, I stopped by Seth's and told him we had a gig. Of course, at that point we didn't have a band yet, so we got together just before the show and put together a few old songs of mine. When we got to Rock Coffee, they informed us that the open mic night had to be cancelled this week, but told us of another local coffehouse that was holding one. That's how we ended up at the Empyrean.
Long story short, we rocked. We rocked uber-hard to an audience that at times was composed entirely of Jeni. Hopefully we'll get to do that again someime. I'll let you know when the next show is.
Tonight's Set List:
Too Good
Without A Scream
O Ephraim
Alesis MultiMix 8 USB
When I say "gender equality" I don't mean the idea that except for our fleshy shells men and women are identical. What I mean instead is that you cannot peg one gender as superior to the other. Men and women are different as a whole, but to a much greater extent individual men and women are different from each other. By ditching the idea that one gender is superior to the other, both as a whole and in specific qualities, the playing field is leveled for individuals to excel at what they are gifted at.
On a related note, I believe that many of the traits traditionally labeled "feminine" and therefore inferior, are actually not inferior but are usually needed to counterbalance the "masculine" traits which often become so prevalent in authoritative positions. This is why I am very supportive of having female leaders in the church. (I am also supportive of female leaders in politics, academics, business, etc., but the church is what impacts my life most right now.) A diverse group of leaders will be more representative of those being led and will therefore be better equipped to represent and relate to those people. Anyway, that's just a little bit of my personal soap-box.
Oh yeah, and great sex comes out of a belief in gender equality, a belief in gender quality does not result from great sex. (Well, who am I to say that, really. It's outside of my realm of experience, so sometimes it may indeed happen that way.)
On a related note, I believe that many of the traits traditionally labeled "feminine" and therefore inferior, are actually not inferior but are usually needed to counterbalance the "masculine" traits which often become so prevalent in authoritative positions. This is why I am very supportive of having female leaders in the church. (I am also supportive of female leaders in politics, academics, business, etc., but the church is what impacts my life most right now.) A diverse group of leaders will be more representative of those being led and will therefore be better equipped to represent and relate to those people. Anyway, that's just a little bit of my personal soap-box.
Oh yeah, and great sex comes out of a belief in gender equality, a belief in gender quality does not result from great sex. (Well, who am I to say that, really. It's outside of my realm of experience, so sometimes it may indeed happen that way.)
The end of the summer has an odd effect, or at least it has on me. I feel compelled to simultaneously get as much done as I can in order to be prepared for the start of the school year as well as to make up for all the slacking off I didn't do during the summer. This summer was not as busy for me as previous ones, there was no house to sell, no summer job, no real college prep, but I still kept myself pretty busy. I continued playing at the church and also provided music for two weddings over the summer. The weddings were nice because they forced me to keep my guitar skills up over the summer, a time when many college music students slack off on practice. But now, at the end of the summer, I have realized that I spent a lot of time preparing for the weddings but less time working on my musical goals for this next school year. I got done with the weddings was last weekend, so since then there's been a whole lot of Bach going on. My summer goals were to have playable Bach's third cello suite in its entirety and Giuliani's Grand Overture. I'll meet the Bach goal by the skin of my teeth. The Giuliani will take me a little longer.
So that fulfills the compulsive need to be busy, and you can probably imagine how I've been fulfilling the compulsive need to slack off. I'll give you a hint:
When you print this be sure to set Paint to scale the image to fit on one page or else you might get Steggy split down the middle and on two pages.
Click to enlarge
